Content area
Full text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Paris Blues: African American Music and French Popular Culture, 1920-1960 . By Andy Fry . Chicago, IL and London : University of Chicago Press , 2014. 282 pp. ISBN-13 978-0-226-13881-7
Reviews
This cultural history of jazz in France manages to be both enjoyable and scholarly, incisive but engaging - its style neither too formal nor too familiar. As with the later story of rock'n'roll, French intellectuals and other commentators have always had strong, revealing and sometimes morally ambivalent reactions to invasive Anglophone popular musics. But these reactions have rarely been as straightforwardly nationalist or anti-American as they are often thought to be. Fry sets out to show that conventional narratives about jazz's arrival and implantation in France fail to capture the complexity of such reactions. His mission is to give a more nuanced picture, particularly where two widely accepted and in fact contradictory perceptions are concerned. The first is the 'rose-tinted' view that visiting African American jazz musicians found a more liberal, less racist, climate for their creativity than in the States. The second is that, in large part due to the culture shock of Josephine Baker's Paris performances in La Revue nègre in 1925, jazz was consistently viewed in France as primitive and inferior. Fry shows that, while neither of these historical takes on the music's...